Olivia Strittmatter - Ecology and Religion

April 7, 2020

From the topic of my choosing 1

For the next five blog posts I’m going to do the five articles I found on my topic, which is religion and ecology. The first article that I’m going to cover is actually a book called Ecology and Religion by John Grim and Evelyn Tucker. I will add the link to the book review and a link to Amazon if you want to buy it and read it. They go over the shift in vision of nature as well as the evolution of understanding in western traditions and in environmental sciences. Throughout their book they discuss their experiences with world religions and ecology, especially Indiginous and East Asian religions. Grim and Tucker wrote this book to share their experiences, but to also spread information on cultivating sensibilities and ethics that are needed in order to create a better human-Earth relationship. They call for religious communities to express how important it is that we take care of the Earth or the nature and ecosystems that we know now will be greatly reduced. This book was published in 2014, so it’s been six years, and I don’t think people are doing enough to help save the dying environment. Anyway, Grim and Tucker gave the readers a “challenge” to reevaluate their relationship with the non-human world from a religious standpoint. They said to find where our religions promote violence, unsustainability, and injustice, and to understand that that is not what’s best for the world. They also said to deepen our sense of empathy with the whole world, to live sustainably, and to educate ourselves further on what critical changes need to be made to improve the Earth. Our religious practices dictate how we live our daily lives, so if religious communities are making changes to how we are supposed to live, and encouraging people to be more sustainable and less neglectful to our world we depend on.



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